Description: Your Youtube content can out-perform and out-convert traditional website content with these key tips. Nate Woodbury from Be the Hero joins us to share his...

Sure Oak: Digital Marketing, SEO, Online Business Strategy, & More

How to Drive Sales through Cold Outreach with Lior Ohayon

How to turn your Youtube Channel into a Lead Generation Machine

How to reach out to Geoff Atkinson: Google has a perfect world, and if you want to see long-term success with your business, it’s time your website started living in it. The most successful businesses follow Google’s ideal model, and they’ve seen some huge returns from their online efforts. In this episode, Geoff Atkinson of Huckabuy delves into that perfect world and the methods you can implement to find your place in it. Keep reading to find out more. Google’s Perfect World In Google’s perfect world, all websites would look as if they were built for Google, not humans. This is because the Google bot acts as a “bouncer” that grants your website access to the customers beyond. They’re your most important visitor, and what they look for is different from a human’s perfect website experience. These are the top 3 characteristics they look for. Fast Page Speed and Loading Time For years now, Google has hammered on the importance of having a good page speed and loading time. This is important no matter what platform is used to access your website, so much so that slower websites often see huge penalties in their search engine rankings. These penalties are largely the result of Google’s inability to fully crawl the websites. Google bots have a finite amount of time to crawl each website, and when your pages take too long, they tend to give up and move onto the next site on their list. No Complicated Coding Languages The next characteristic Google crawlers search for is flat HTML. The more simplistically your website is coded, the more likely they will be to promote it. Think of it as UX for Google. You want Google to keep coming back to your site each time you add a new page or piece of content. They won’t do that if you make it difficult to navigate with complicated coding languages. Automation of Structured Data Markup In every algorithm update over the last 5 years, Google has given more and more weight to mobile-friendliness and the structured data of websites. If your website is currently designed without flat HTML, you can benefit from structured data. This is because it helps make your website more understandable, which translates into better indexation, more clicks, more customers, and significantly higher revenue. An example of this would be rich snippets. These enable you to target users who can qualify themselves as potential customers. Don’t worry, though, a complete redesign of your website isn’t necessary to make structured data or any of the other characteristics available for Google. A new “wrinkle” in the website called dynamic rendering now makes it possible for websites to load dynamically based on what “calls” them. So when a Google bot calls up a page on your website, they’ll see a simplified version of the website you show users. Businesses that take advantage of dynamic rendering on their websites see a more defined role in Google’s perfect world than those that don’t. Google just wants to be able to access the world’s information. If you want to succeed, your website information should be made as available as possible. KEY INSIGHTS Google’s perfect world involves simple websites that load quickly. Google’s search bots give up on indexing your site if pages don’t load within a certain timeframe. Dynamic rendering is a great way to give Google a simple website without affecting customer experience. GEOFF’S TAKEAWAYS Wikipedia is a great example of Google’s perfect world. You need to put fundamental architecture into place if you want Google to index your site and know what you’re doing. Websites that get the most benefit from structured data are the ones that are difficult for Google to understand without help MORE FROM GEOFF The Huckabuy Website Geoff's LinkedIn Subscribe on Apple PodcastsSubscribe on Other Platforms

Finding Your Place in Google’s Perfect World with Geoff Atkinson

The best place to reach your ideal customers depends on the niche you’re in, but if your audience includes business owners, then LinkedIn can be a great place to start..

John Bellamy’s tips for developing more conversations and sales with your ideal future customers

How to reach out to Garrett Mehrguth: Setting a Marketing Budget When setting a marketing budget for your business, it’s important to make sure you use every penny wisely. This means not stretching your company too thin and not assuming your level of income. This may seem like a simple rule, but for many businesses, it’s difficult to execute correctly. That’s why we sat down with Garret Mehrguth of Directive Consulting. In this episode, Garrett explains how to set a marketing budget that gives you the most bang for your buck, as well as the tips he wishes he knew when starting out in marketing. So if you’re looking to outline a marketing budget that can help you reach your business goals, don’t stop scrolling. The Importance of Setting a Marketing Budget Every business owner knows they should set a marketing budget, but do you truly know why it’s important for your future success? The data you use to determine your budget plays a HUGE role in your ability to scale effectively. In fact, if you choose to base your budget on assumptions of what you’ll be making, rather than on your historical revenue, you’ll be much more likely to eventually run out of cash. Think of it this way: your marketing efforts should be bringing in money, NOT sucking your business dry. When you bank on future sales that may or may not come to fruition, you decrease your chances of achieving the revenue and growth goals you’ve set. This is because future sales are unpredictable. The market is always changing, and it’s impossible to plan for every potentiality. However, when you base your projected earnings, and therefore, your marketing budget, on the revenue you KNOW your business can generate, you maximize your ability to scale your company effectively. If that still seems complicated, follow this simple rule. Your marketing budget should be equivalent to 10 percent of the revenue you expect to generate in that same period of time. So if you’re planning your budget for an entire year, it should be equal to 10% of what you can solidly project you’ll generate in revenue that year. Make sense? Here’s why. What Garrett Wishes He Knew BEFORE He Started Marketing When you’re a business owner, you can grow and want to grow, but if you do it too fast, you won’t be able to sustain it. If you can’t sustain the amount of velocity you’re striving toward, then it’s time to tone down your spending. It may sound counterintuitive to grow by spending less, but in truth, it’s all about strategy. People often have an idea that once something “works”, they’ll increase its volume and spend anything. This isn’t the best approach to growth. In fact, the best approach is to actually raise rates while keeping your volume the same. Doing this enables you to bring in revenue without growing too fast. Once you’ve grown your revenue intake to a level that allows you to invest more in your company infrastructure, you can begin to slowly increase the volume of your marketing efforts. Before you do, though ask yourself the following questions: What’s your average contract value? Do you have the ability to service new customers with the same level of care that you have been with current customers? Do you have the capital necessary to service your company infrastructure? How does your desired marketing budget compare to your historical revenue? Have you evaluated your historical revenue to determine what your marketing budget should be? Once your answers to those questions are positive, you will be in a good place to begin increasing the velocity of your marketing efforts, rather than just your rates. Don’t Make This Mistake When deciding on your marketing budget, be sure to avoid making the mistake of blind ambition. This ties into the questions above, as no matter how good of a company you are, you simply cannot increase sales velocity without decreasing quality. This means you must grow in ways that are sustainable and not reckless. There are two ways you can do that.

Garrett Mehrguth on Getting the Most Bang For Your Buck with Your Marketing Budget

How to reach out to James Winter: The marketing industry is constantly changing, especially when it comes to content. If you want to make it long term, you have to stay up-to-date on those changes. This week, we sat down with James Winter of Brandfolder to learn what trends are currently taking content marketing by storm and how to take advantage of them (and any others that become big) for your business. Biggest Trends in Content Today At the moment, there are two major trends in content that James recommends keeping in mind as you work on your content marketing strategy. The first is the decreasing shelf life of content. This can be anything from videos or photos to GIFs or whitepapers. It doesn’t just mean written content. In today’s mobile world, people are constantly looking for the most up-to-date information. To perform well on different online channels, your content assets need to be regularly refreshed, and in many cases, evergreen. This translates to a need for higher production of assets, meaning you can’t always get away with only producing one piece of content for every one of your social channels. To stay relevant, you have to create relevant content. This means paying special attention to the shelf life of each asset. The second trend to be aware of is the rise of video. YouTube is no longer the only platform where video performs well. In fact, it’s quickly become a solid strategy for reaching consumers and fostering engagement for your business. In many cases, including Facebook and Instagram, ads that contain videos are prioritized over those with only photos or text. The same applies to simple posts that contain videos. This is because videos invite users to engage much more than just words or a photo can do. People relate more to businesses that are relatable. Video helps make your company more relatable by putting a face and personality to it. Although these trends are currently taking the content world by storm, it’s important to keep in mind that they can change at any time. This is where staying aware of the direction marketing is headed comes into play. The most successful companies are on the cutting edge of content and other marketing strategies, as well as SEO and Google’s algorithm focus. There isn’t one particular location you can look to for up-to-date information, but there are still a number of ways to say on top of the changing landscape. These are the two James recommends looking into if you want to stay on top of trends. Staying Up to Date On Changing Trends The first place you should look for up-to-date information on current marketing trends is the list of podcasts for your niche industry. Podcasts are great because they’re timely and you can rest assured the information contained in recent episodes is relevant to what you’re trying to do. The second location you can look to for relevant information on changing content trends is your network. This can include people you know personally, as well as experts in the industry who you only know by their content. And if you have trouble finding the right people to follow, James is happy to offer some suggestions. Just reach out to him via Twitter or LinkedIn. The Bottom Line If you’re still a little reticent about the importance of staying atop current content trends, here’s the bottom line: The creative your company creates is responsible for 85% of your ads’ performance, as well as a large portion of how your website performs overall. If you have the right creative for your content assets, you’ll be that much more successful than your competitors who have fallen into the trap of “over-wordsmithing” and a subpar reliance on relevant, relatable content. Don’t be afraid to prioritize the new trends you learn about from podcasts or your network. You never know how much they can help your business in the long run. On the other hand, the biggest mistake you could make besides not creating relevant content is diving into too many new tactics at ...

How to Take Advantage of Changing Content Trends with James Winter

Every company will say they have a brand ambassador, but not all actually have one. To be a brand ambassador, you must be the spokesperson or...

The Benefits of Having a Brand Ambassador for Your Business with Darryl Praill

Starting a side project is difficult, but turning it into a successful business is even harder. On this episode, hear from ClickMinded’s Tommy Griffith and learn the single biggest factor to getting your side project up and running.

How to Successfully Transform Your Side Project into a Full-Time Job with Tommy Griffith

How to reach out to James Gilbert: Customer Experience and Why It’s So Important When you’re a business, one of your biggest goals is likely to bring in customers. In the long run, though, it costs significantly more to attract new customers than it does to cultivate the customers your company already has. So what role does customer experience play in this cultivation? James Gilbert of CloudCherry explains how CX can be a key driver of business growth and profitability in this podcast episode. Keep reading for the details. Successful Customers Vs. New Customers People tend to trust companies that bring a human element to their customer experience. This means treating consumers like partners, rather than a sale. Doing this has been shown to reap huge benefits, as successful customers often become advocates that function as an “engine” for inbound sales and referral marketing galore. Bringing a human element to your customer experience doesn’t stop with the marketing department, however. Every department within your business needs to be synced and collaborate to give people the best interactions possible at each step of the customer journey. Companies often struggle with implementing a customer focused mindset throughout their business, as identifying pain points and the best place to begin reform can be difficult. It’s All About Alignment If you’re going to begin a customer experience program, success begins at the top of your organization. Every person in your company, from the CEO to the most junior worker, has to live and breathe creating great experiences for customers. The more aligned your business is on customer experience, the easier it will become to identify and address customer pain points before they become major issues. This applies to every step of the customer journey, from awareness to investment and beyond. Simply put, organization alignment means looking at every customer interaction with the mindset of “how can we give them the best experience”, rather than “what’s in it for me”. If you can do that, your business will be leagues ahead of competitors, and you’ll be guaranteed to see yield from happy customers and their advocacies. To get started, James recommends mapping out every step of your customer journey and analyzing the type of experience those steps provide. Every aspect of your business needs to be geared toward customer success if you want to turn customers into advocates and see long-term growth and profit. Marketing and Customer Experience As you map out your customer journey, it’s important to keep in mind that every person will have a unique path they take to become your customers. These journeys will vary depending on customer personas, the marketing channels they convert with, and much more. To be successful, you will need to analyze every avenue and optimize them to promote customer engagement and satisfaction. Common CX Mistakes Companies Make More often than not, companies seeking to create a solid consumer experience will make the mistake of implementing their plan without first having organization alignment. Every interaction a customer has with your company needs to be backed up, and if even one encounter is off, you run the risk of having your efforts fall flat. Another mistake businesses tend to make with customer experience is pushing consumers into making purchases. Purchases and investments in your company should be the natural result of a person’s interactions with you, not of aggressive sales decks. If you can create a positive customer experience within your sales process, you’ll stand out and make sales without having to press. Everything comes naturally when you have a customer-centric culture. The Role of CX In Long-Term Growth and Profitability A strong company alignment that centers on implementing a positive customer experience is a huge driver of ROI. In fact, keeping current customers happy costs significantly less over time than treating them poorly and focusing ...

James Gilbert On The Value of Organization Alignment in Customer Experience

How to reach out to Hank Hoffmeier: When you put together an email marketing campaign, there are some factors to take into account if you want it to be successful. Email marketing expert Hank Hoffmeier of iContact shared those factors and his suggestions for yielding a huge ROI from your efforts in this week’s podcast. Here are some of the main highlights of what he and our host, Bryan Reynolds, discussed. Factors to Consider for Email Marketing Success There are a number of components that go into a successful email marketing strategy. The first lies in your ability to actually get people to open the emails you send. It doesn’t matter how well written the body of your email is. If your subject line isn’t enticing enough to click, nobody will receive the message you’re hoping to convey. If you want consumers to actually open and engage with your emails, you’ll need to get inside their heads. Ask yourself whether you would want to open the email if you received it, and use that to gauge whether it’s ready to send. Remember, people are more likely to read emails that are personalized and that convey usefulness. This can be done by using their names in both the subject line and body text, as well as with email content that addresses problems your audience may be experiencing. The next factor you need to consider is your email’s call to action. This is just as important as the subject line, as it brings your readers even closer to becoming paying customers. If your CTA doesn’t drive the point home and entice people to learn more, they won’t click through to your landing page. Once you get your subject line and call to action optimized, your job isn’t done. You then need to turn your attention to the landing page you link to. This page needs to be a follow-up to the content of your email that moves readers even further along in the buying process. From there, stay in contact with your contacts and reach out to any who abandon their shopping carts. Getting Into the Inbox Although all of the above factors are necessary for implementing a successful campaign, they won’t get you anywhere if the emails don’t even make it into readers’ inboxes. Every aspect of your campaign relies on deliverability, so you’ll want to do all you can to ensure you maintain a positive domain reputation. Here are some of the components that affect your reputation: Positive Actions Think of your domain reputation as a credit score. Each time you send an email, providers like Gmail evaluate the actions your contacts take and ding or elevate your score based on those actions. Actions that have a positive impact include opening emails, clicking their links, marking emails as important and marking emails as TINS (this is not spam). The more positive interactions people have with your emails, the more likely providers will be to let your emails into the inboxes of new subscribers. Negative Actions Although it’s impossible to completely eliminate negative reactions to your emails, you can greatly reduce the number of times they happen through personalization and usefulness. Some of the events that have a negative impact on your score include email bounces (invalid email addresses), being marked as spam, requests to unsubscribe, and worse, having your emails go ignored. To increase the likelihood of positive reactions, avoid making the following mistakes. Don’t Make These Mistakes One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is thinking that buying contact lists will help. Unfortunately, it will actually have the opposite effect on your deliverability “credit” score. The same goes for sending emails to unengaged contacts. Although an “are we breaking up” email can be good for list hygiene, constantly sending emails to contacts who don’t want to hear from you will have negative effects on your score. Similar to this is your list hygiene. Hank recommends cleaning out your contact list at least once per year, if not every 6 months.

Hank Hoffmeier’s Keys to Email Deliverability and Email Marketing Success

How to reach out to Pat Flynn: What are Superfans? Everybody is a superfan of something, including you. But your superfan status didn’t happen overnight. You became a fan after multiple moments and interactions with your favorite brand, person, or idea. Unfortunately, too many businesses focus the majority of their efforts on nurturing leads in the beginning of the marketing funnel. While this is important, it’s more critical to pay attention to the experience people have once they become customers. If you aren’t creating moments that bring them further toward becoming superfans, Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income says you’re missing out on some incredible business opportunities. In fact, you don’t even need very many superfans to see results. Just 1,000 fans can do amazing things for the growth of your business and brand. These fans are critical to growth because they market your brand without any payment and bring new, warm leads into your brand. To help you turn more of your customers into superfans, we asked Pat Flynn for his tips on taking customers from passive investors to engaged superfans. Here’s what he had to say. How to Take People to Superfan Status In 2007, Kevin Kelly wrote an essay explaining the value of superfans for your business. Although the essay was great, Pat felt it didn’t work well as a “how to” guide for creating superfans. That’s why Pat wrote his new book, called Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business, which functions as the guide that essay was not. So what, exactly, can you do to take your customers to superfan status? There are two main actions you can take. Be Human Showing your personality as part of your brand can go a long way toward establishing a solid relationship with your customers. People want to do business with other people, not faceless companies. Simply put, business is now about P2P (person-to-person) contact rather than B2B or B2C. If you want to see success, it requires personality and relatability. Offer Quick Wins Quick wins make people more likely to invest more heavily in a product or brand. If you want to change someone’s life with your product, you have to start off by changing their day. This is where it becomes important to interact with your customers and get to know their needs. If you can satisfy some of those needs quickly, they’ll be more likely to become superfans and promote your business to others. Utilize Superfans and Grow Your Business Once you’ve brought some customers further up the ladder toward becoming superfans, it’s critical to give them a community to engage with. If you’re passionate about something, you want someone to share it with. Communities like online forums, special pages on your website, meetups, workshops, and conferences give your fans the opportunity to engage with one another and experience more of those touches we mentioned earlier. This, in turn, elevates your brand. Remember, the more positive touches customers have with your business, the more likely they will be to become superfans. It’s also important to maintain this sense of community no matter how much your business grows. In the beginning, you can give your business an advantage over larger corporations by answering every instance of outreach from your customers. And if you hire a team to keep that up as you grow, your superfans will continue to be passionate about your brand and bring more revenue into your business. Help Your Business with Superfans It’s never too late to convert passive customers into superfans. All it takes is some individuality, personality, and a focus on satisfying the needs of the individual. If you can keep all of these in mind as you engage with customers throughout the funnel, you’ll be well on your way to seeing the business growth you’re looking for. KEY INSIGHTS Business is about person-to-person connections, not B2B or B2C anymore. You don’t need very many superfans to see a significant improv...

Superfans: How to Get More Activated Customers with Pat Flynn

What’s a marketer to do when their link building efforts aren’t seeing the results they’re looking for? The answer may seem intuitive, but many businesses have trouble putting it into practice...

Why You Should Think Of Link Building As A Value Exchange with Marvin Magusara

Like SEO, PPC, Content Marketing, and every other form of generating leads for your business, a successful influencer marketing campaign requires research, patience, and...

The Role of Influencer Marketing in Business Success with Shane Barker

With many growth hacks out there, it can be easy for founders of digital products to get carried away with investing in them as a marketing strategy. In reality, the only...

How to Deliver More Value to Customers with Tim Soulo

Tech stacks are quickly becoming a major component of every business model. This week, Christopher Antonopoulos of Measured Results Marketing explains the dos and don’ts.

hubhopper

Sure Oak: Digital Marketing, SEO, Online Business Strategy, ...

hubhopper